Pomona College received a joint letter last week from the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, asserting the school’s recent suspension of 10 students for the academic year due to their alleged participation in a October 7 protestat Carnegie Hall may have violated their rights, and that a lawsuit may be filed to challenge the decision.
The November 13 letter was co-signed by the Asian Law Caucus, Palestine Legal, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles, and the ACLU Southern California. It called on Pomona College to immediately lift the suspensions.
“The student suspensions, and the peremptory manner they were imposed in, violate the students’ rights under California law,” reads the letter. “Imposing discipline for that is a violation of the student’s rights to free speech, expression, and association under California’s Leonard Law, which extends the full protections of the First Amendment to students at private postsecondary institutions, including Pomona College. Additionally, suspending the students without providing them with a meaningful opportunity to be heard violates their due process rights. In California, some disciplinary decisions of private institutions are subject to the common law doctrine of Fair Procedure.”…